Satellite Technologies for Improved Drought-Risk Assessment

Field Test successfully completed

Supported by the Spanish Section of Doctors without Borders, we tested our mobile app “SATIDA COLLECT”. The collaboration with local community health workers worked fine. They were trained for one day and finally managed to visit more than 100 households, representing more than 900 family members. All assessments were uploaded to a database that also allows visualizing the GPS location of each dwelling. Despite a very poor bandwidth the upload of one completed assessment took between 5 and 10 seconds. Knowing the current coverage based on the GPS information gives users a good overview of regions that have/have not been covered by surveys.

Our findings indicate that the food insecurity in our region of interest, which will currently not be disclosure on this blog due to its unstable political condition, that was observed last year was not related to a climatic shock, but to the violent conflict. Based on our satellite-derived data we could proof that there was not a significant deficit in rainfall or soil moisture. However, people were afraid of farming due to the presence of armed groups. Finally, we identified several other applications that SATIDA COLLECT could be used for, such as evaluating the success of vaccination campaigns by a quick digitization of the assessments. Out of these preliminary results, a final report/publication is now available here.